Fig. 1.

Task design and distribution of stimulation sites. a On each trial, participants were presented (auditorily) with a preamble such as “Today, we will ...”. After a 1-s delay, they were given a target word, presented visually (e.g., “talked”) that they had to produce out loud either as presented or after manipulating it in some way. b Several target word manipulations were introduced in order to test for the specific effect of stimulation on basic sensory perceptual processing and articulation (control condition), the ability to recognize and phonetically transform the target word (phonetic condition), the ability to retrieve lexical information from memory (lexical condition), and, more broadly, the ability to understand language and respond with the appropriate semantic knowledge (semantic condition). Additional comparisons included nouns vs. verbs, regular vs. irregular inflections, and suffix additions vs. subtractions (Supplementary Table 2). A few representative examples of sentence preambles (black italic) and target words (red italic) in the critical syntactic condition are provided. c Here, we focused on the posterior superior temporal cortex, which borders the supramarginal and angular gyri (P-STG refers to the posterior-most aspect of the superior temporal gyrus). The anatomical temporal–parietal junction (TPJ) is drawn in blue. Individual, stereotactically identified stimulation sites are shown by dark-blue dots (n = 113) on the right. Due to surgical constraints, however, not all stimulated sites were comprehensively tested (n = 54, “Methods”)